Gerhard Richter has permanently loaned 100 works to the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, a to-be-completed museum complex in the city. “I am delighted the paintings are coming to Berlin,” Richter said in a statement. (more…)

The French government will return a Gustav Klimt landscape stolen from its original owner by the Nazis in 1938. “It is in recent years that the true origin of the painting has been established,” says French culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot. (more…)

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Painter Pat Lipsky has won a ruling against her gallery, with a New York Court ruling that artists’ work cannot be distorted in online reproductions. “This ruling should help artists to protect their legacies and reputations, particularly in this pandemic-induced time of virtual art exhibitions and fairs,” Lipsky counsel William Charron of Pryor Cashman says. (more…)

Marina Abramovic will launch a “digital manifestation” of The Abramovic Method  on WeTransfer, making the work “available to everyone, all day, every day, reaching 70 million people worldwide.”  (more…)

John Waters, La Mer (2009), via Sprüth Magers

Taking over the exhibition space at Sprüth Magers’s Los Angeles gallery, John Waters takes a shot at the famous and infamous among the long annals of film culture, pop culture, and celebrity, opening a show that compiles a range of works from the past ten years that drive home the artist’s bitingly satirical abilities as a foremost critique of American culture, both high and low.

John Waters, Hollywood’s Greatest Hits (Installation View), via Sprüth Magers

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Dutch Museums are pushing ahead on a €4.5m plan to build a practical guide advising on colonial collections and repatriation. “We will examine the diverse routes that objects took to enter museums—were they sold under duress or looted in times of war, traded or exchanged or given as gifts, and if so, was this in a colonial context?” says Wayne Modest, the director of content at the National Museum of World Cultures. “We will also look at how to jointly decide on the future of an object and whether there are various modes of return that are possible. And, finally, this is about reconciliation—how do modes of return or restitution help us to reconcile with the past?” (more…)

A piece in the New York Times this week catalogs a series of outside investigations and complaints at the Detroit Institute of Arts, particularly around a “lack of facility with race-related issues.” “The Board wants anyone with concerns, new or lingering, to come forward, and be heard,” the museum said in a statement.  (more…)

Caitlin Keogh, Waxing Year 3 (2020), via Overduin and Co.

Painter Caitlin Keogh‘s works are orchestrations of symbolism, blending together a range of images and patterns that give the final composition a dizzying series of touchpoints, and ultimately arrive at a final composition that seems to rarely rest on any single image. Such is the case with her new show of works currently on view at Overduin and Co. in Los Angeles, a selection of pieces that emphasize shifting grounds and a composite sense of reality.  (more…)

Financier Leon Black is currently in discussions with the trustees of MoMa regarding his future with the museum and ties to Jeffrey Epstein. “I would love to show at MoMA but you have to stick to your ethics,” says Nan Goldin. “How can MoMA stand by Leon Black?” (more…)

Six artists and one collective have pulled their work from a show at Chicago’s MCA over complaints about access, equity and labor.“I was very disappointed to learn how employees were being treated and did not want to lend my work to a show whose sponsoring institution was operating in contradiction to the show’s very premise,” said the artist Folayemi Wilson. (more…)

Michelle Grabner (Installation View), via James Cohan

Marking a range of new explorations in an already diverse and wide-ranging body of work, artist Michelle Grabner opens a new show of works this month at James Cohan in downtown Manhattan. Marking a renewed engagement with restoration and material, Grabner’s installation meditates on simple gestures and repetition as a manner to explore an expansive interior world.

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (2021), via James Cohan (more…)

John Russell, Well (2021), via Bridget Donahue

Well, John Russell‘s new exhibition on view through this weekend at Bridget Donahue in New York consists of a single work, an 87 x 22 ft Vinyl print of “Hell,” as the gallery describes it, a sprawling digital collage that twists a range of horrifying graphics and symbols into a teeming mass of spectatorship. (more…)

Robert Grosvenor, Untitled (2019), via Paula Cooper

Exploring divergent production approaches and interlocking conceptual outputs, the current exhibition at Paul Cooper’s 26th street exhibition explores the work of Robert Grosvenor and David Novros, exploring the pair’s shared interests and many years of friendship.  Grosvenor, a sculptor, and Novros, a painter, met as members of the artists’ cooperative and gallery Park Place, a hotbed of avant-garde art in the 1960s. Contemporaries and mutual admirers of each other’s work, their shared sensitivity to architectural space and approach towards particular conditions for viewing art make for a unique show plan.  (more…)

Charles Ray, Clothes Pile (2020), via Matthew Marks

Pursuing a timely and intriguing exploration of the current contexts of confinement and isolation as expressed in our Covid-19 dominated world, Matthew Marks Gallery has opened a new show, Home Life, at its 523 West 24th Street. Featuring new works by Alex Da Corte, Robert Gober, and Charles Ray, all exhibited for the first time, together with earlier works by Nayland Blake, Nan Goldin, and Ken Price, among others, the show takes the domestic and the personal as a springboard for broader ideations around the expression of self and society in the most intimate environs.  (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper details the recent trend towards creative agencies representing artists in pursuit of large-scale commissions and other projects. “We focus exclusively on building and actioning a bespoke strategy for each artist that we work with,” says Rebecca Davies of Southern & Partners. (more…)

The staff at Mass MOCA is pushing to unionize. “We don’t have specifics yet, but some of the things that have come up already are better pay, better COVID safety precautions [and] benefits like paid family leave and more flexible working situations,” says Amanda Tobin, the museum’s associate director of education. (more…)

The Paris Biennale is permanently discontinued, Art Newspaper reports. Once considered among the world’s most prestigious fairs, the event has folded to pursue new projects. (more…)

Jonathan Monk, Not Me, Me (Installation View)

Jonathan Monk’s investigations into memory, ephemera and artistic process emerge from his practice as an inveterate observer, participant and collector of both popular culture and conceptual art, a constant observer and documentarian whose works explore the wide ranges of history, politics, sociology and memory in a way that brings the viewer with him through a maze of references and touchpoints. In a new series of works on view at Lisson this month, particularly a set of collages entitled Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information, Monk charts and revisits some of his own exhibition history using photographic evidence of previous solo shows, harking back to the first museum presentation featuring wallpaper of his own past work at Kunsthaus Baselland in 2016. (more…)

Following the announced closure of Metro Pictures, Cindy Sherman will head to Hauser & Wirth, Art News reports. “Cindy is already established in the history of modern and contemporary American art, thanks in no small measure to the extraordinary work of Janelle Reiring and Helene Winer of Metro Pictures, her gallery since the early 1980s. We are excited to build upon their achievements and to introduce the artist’s work to ever-broader audiences and new generations worldwide,” says Marc Payot. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has moved to Portugal, and is currently planning a large-scale sculptural tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev. “To this day we don’t see anyone like Gorbachev in China,” he says. “But if China doesn’t have political reform like what Gorbachev initiated, there will be no good result of China’s economic development.” (more…)

Metro Pictures will close by year’s end, the gallery has announced, ending its run as a major player in New York’s art market. “We have decided to announce this difficult decision far in advance of our closing in order to give the artists we represent and our staff time to pursue other options and to allow us to participate in their transitions,” the gallery said in a statement. (more…)

Etel Adnan, Horizon 8 (2020), via Lévy Gorvy

Currently on at Lévy Gorvy in Paris, the artist Etel Adnan has curated a selection of works in collaboration with Victoire de Pourtalès, centered around a poetic and nostalgic text by the artist. Exploring her movements between Lebanon, California, and France, the text, and the show at large considers the importance of physical and aesthetic displacements, using her own personal horizon, and the questions raised by such mutations as a way to explore broader questions of social and cultural dynamics. (more…)

Lucas Blalock, M_M_M_M_M_ (Daisychain) (2020), via Eva Presenhuber

Open now at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s New York exhibition space, artist Lucas Blalock has brought together a body of new works under the title Florida, 1989, marking his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing on memory and trauma, Blalock’s work in the show explores his own history, and its traces appearing throughout his work.  (more…)